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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5431870" data-attributes="member: 42582">There is no such option in the published rules (although I think there might be in a recent number of Dragon - I don't subscribe but saw some thread traffic about it).In the post I quoted I was alluding back to a previous post in which I said that introducing such an option into 4e would be completely trivial - because there is already a mechanical place in the game at which just that sort of decision must be made by a player. It wouldn't require any new mechanical subsystem, and it would have zero effect on the mechanical balance of play.Two responses.First, what you say about 4e is not true. Diseases are a non-magical hindrance that, per the mechanics, can easily get worse over time. If you wanted to introduce infection into 4e, you could easily do so by ruling that the PCs are exposed to a disease (let's say Filth Fever - it's pretty generic) every time they fight in a dungeon.Second, are you really positing that, in the world of AD&D or 4e as played by the rules as written, no one ever loses an eye or a limb simply on the grounds that there are no mechanics that produce such an outcome? I've always taken it to be implicit in either game that some things - like losing a limb as a result of being run over by a wagon - happen in the gameworld even though the mechanics don't deal with them. (Because the mechanics don't deal with them they probably don't happen to PCs - but that's another story.)My point was that if you want to introduce blinding via combat into 4e, you can do so very easily. I explained how. If you think it's not actually that easy, I'm curious as to why.Except that this would utterly change the mechanics of 4e combat, for the reasons I've now set out in two posts upthread.It would utterly change those mechanics because those mechanics, currently, depend upon the fact that accessing surges during combat is tactically non-trivial.I don't really understand this. Suffice it to say that the narrative tempo of 4e combat - the PCs begin by being nearly overwhelmed by the monsters, but then come back and win as the players make the tactical decisions that allow access to their PCs' surges and their superior powers - is not a problem. It is the essence of the design of 4e's combat system, and surges are integral to it's design.Ie - if you rewrite 4e's rules to get rid of all the features of the game that give it a strong and dynamic combat system, and replace them with a huge hit point sink, then you can probably create a game that would be less interesting to play than 3E or AD&D. I'm not sure what that proves, though, other than that the designers were sensible in not designing that game.If you want natural healing to matter in 4e, introduce a rule that only 1 HS is regained per extended rest. This will mean that most PCs require between 1 and 2 weeks to fully regain their surges. This would change the pacing of adventures from the rules as written, but would have virtually no effect on the mechanical balance of the game.In my own game I haven't done this precise thing, but I have (from time to time) required rest on the part of the PCs, and/or imposed penalties to overland travel skill challenges, and/or ruled that some lost HS (ie those lost to exhaustion) can't be recovered without rest. The effect of all this is precisely to mix up the pacing a bit. It doesn't affect the micro-balance of combat at all. And it's a trivial deviation from the published rules text (or maybe not a deviation at all, depending exactly what one takes to be implied by the skill challenge rules read in conjunction with the environmental exhaustion rules).This is another place where actual play examples would help. In my own game, if I have built an encounter assuming that it will be challenging because the PCs will come to it with few dailies, and few surges and hence only limited opportunities for healing during combat, and in fact they have taken an extended rest beforehand and therefore are fully primed and ready to go, I simply rewrite the encounter - adding opponents, or adding levels to opponents. This is easy to do and resolves the pacing issues. (From memory, it is also how the DMG2 suggests dealing with the issue.)Of course, if the extended rest was a clever strategem on the part of the players precisely to try to deal with the encounter in question then I would normally just let the get the benefit of their stratagem. But in this case, the rest rules haven't interfered with the narrative of the game at all - they have been integrated into it.Well personally I call it simulationist vs narrativist. It's nothing to do with being combat oriented. Rolemaster is an RPG that plays out exactly as you seem to want, and I know (from experience) that it can be played in a very combat heavy way.</blockquote>

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